Easiest & Most comprehensive Mail Marketing tool

iContact’s main to goal is to incorporate sophisticated features into a simple, easy to use and affordable package. Although many programs attempt to achieve this balance, iContact does so incredibly well.

Great User Interface

iContact is able to do this because of their great user interface, which allows new email marketers hit the ground running with basic features, but also makes it simple for the more experienced to access the features they need. Either way, iContact has created an awesome product, which is why over 50,000 customers currently use iContact.

Basic Features You’ll Love

iContact makes it easy for new email marketers to get in the game quickly:

• Inexpensive: just under $10/month to start!
• Over 300 professionally designed email templates make your emails look professional
• Schedule your messages to be distributed in the future to help save time
• Their system automatically makes sure your emails won’t be flagged as SPAM, so your users will always get your emails.
• Track what your subscribers do with your emails, so you know how well your newsletters are being received.
• Event RSVP tracking
• Distribute surveys easily

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Advanced Features You’ll Love

Professional email marketers also get everything they need to manage their bulk email lists:

• Quickly segment your email list to customize which subscriber types get certain emails
• Set-up autoresponders to help automate your email campaigns
• iContact maintains a detailed history of subscriber actions to help you customize your campaigns
• Design and upload your own email templates
• Unlimited number of email lists

Downside: iContact’s Support Hours

The only downside to iContact is the hours they are available to call. Support is not 24×7, but from 8am to 8pm EST. However, their support staff is very helpful, and many times you will find that it’s actually easier to use their online knowledge base, which has video demonstrations and step-by-step instructions to help you with everything you need.

iContact Pricing

With iContact’s pricing, you only pay for the amount of emails you are going to send, which means that you can start off with an inexpensive plan and pay more only when you know that your newsletter is successful. Plus, iContact is one of the most affordable email marketing providers available.

Contacts	Monthly
250	$9.95
500	$14.00
1000	$19.00
2500	$29.00
5000	$47.00
10000	$74.00
15000	$109.00
25000	$149.00
35000	$239.00
50000	$379.00
75000	$529.00
100000	$699.00

Is It Right For You?

Because of its features and ease of use, iContact is best for both new email marketers just getting started as well as advanced email marketers who have years of experience. However, if you are a Fortune 500 company or have an extremely large email list (over 100,000 subscribers), iContact probably isn’t right for you.

Basically, iContact has everything you will need to run successful email marketing campaigns.

Speed up website load time by denying tracking

Recently it has dawned upon me that not everyone knows about tracking cookies or analytics (Google and so forth) and what it really means when visiting websites… It’s always seen as a form of spy-ware or hacking Trojan to help people gather information and exploit it to their advantage. That is absolutely true, however, not in a “hacking” sense…

Advertising companies are fond of requiring statistics and demographic information from a website before they tend to invest in advertising, and most websites (if not all) have Google Analytics installed to help them track their users for very powerful reports as to trends when visiting the website. Combined with Webmaster Tools (also a Google product) and some comparison data from the physical server logs, this is more than enough to track trends, visitors and useful information when giving it to possible advertisers to decide if your website is indeed worth investing in.

Enter the Nielsen reporting facility. They claim to be the leaders in gathering data and useful information on the public visiting a specific website. Indeed, what they claim is very nice, but how they go about achieving that borders on the “spyware” side.

From my brief overview of the tracking code installed on several South African websites, I found that several attempts at creating “objects” with client-side JavaScript code made it possible for them to determine which programs you have installed on your PC. Indeed, very interesting.

What would a company want with that type of information anyway? Why not just leave it at Google Analytics, a well known website tracking and analytic software made freely available to anyone and everyone?

Something to hide perhaps, but I can only speculate as to their reasons. Perhaps some advertisors insist on this specific piece of tracking code being installed on the website. Nobody would notice right?

Well, some more advanced users have, and most of them have done something about it already, speeding up their South African websites by noticable amounts, they’re enjoying a glimpse of what true broadband speeds are like in other countries, and with this little tutorial, so can you!

Here’s how!
Read more

Using openrowset to connect directly to another database without a linked server and execute a stored procedure

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SELECT *
FROM OPENROWSET('SQLOLEDB',database_location;username;password, 'set fmtonly off exec database.dbo.stored_Procedure') AS Whatever

The above piece of code is self-explanatory. I’ve only used this in SQL 2005 though, so if it doesn’t work on SQL 2000 don’t come crying to me.

Replace database_location with the IP/Destination of the server you’d like to connect to
Replace username/password with… well… do I really have to explain this?
Replace database with the catalog/database you’d like to query
Replace stored_Procedure with the stored procedure you’d like to execute
The “As Whatever” is necessary. You could name this anything you’d like.

I’ve used the above to query a database directly for data extraction/manipulation. You could go as far as to inner join this in your normal queries if you’re not doing an update/add cursor loop on this.

Enjoy. Took me a while to figure it out

Annoying Vista “feature” when I want to print out Tif files used in fax to email

Another annoying “Feature” Microsoft has come up with… Tif files are now considered photos by them, even though the standard for fax to email is the Tif format. This means you have to jump through several hoops just to print out what you received. Thank you Microsoft for unilaterally deciding what I’m trying to accomplish by forcing the idea on me. As a programmer, I know that several things M$ do is in their own interest and thank whatever Holiness you believe in for W3C Standards! (Not that they listen much anyway… M$ invented the internet right? *puke*)

So, if you have Office installed, right-click the file, Open With… and then Navigate to:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\MODI\12.0\MSPVIEW.EXE

(Microsoft Office Document Imaging). This may change depending on which version you’ve installed on your machine. But found it doesn’t try and resize the already sized image perfect for printing into something else, distorting what your original was like for print in the first place.

If you haven’t read any of my posts before, FUCK YOU MICROSOFT. Bill Gates & his team can lick my brown eye for all I care. I hate when people decide things for me, and MY PC telling me how I should print my files is one of the little annoyances I hope to solve when Ubuntu 9 rolls around and hopefully kicks the shit out of Windows 7